Identify Unused Tableau Reports to Reduce BI Maintenance Costs
Description
Organizations often spend significant money maintaining reports that no one uses. According to a research by Iris Software, up to 60% of BI reports in large enterprises go unused, and each report can cost between $4,000 and $10,000 to build and maintain. This recipe can be used to identify and manage such unused reports, and organizations can reduce BI maintenance and infrastructure costs by 25–40%, freeing up time, compute, and budget for insights that truly drive business value. This recipe helps you pinpoint unused or low-engagement Tableau reports, enabling smarter rationalization, lower operational overhead, and a have a leaner and more efficient analytics environment.
Details
Business value
- Reduce BI maintenance overhead by retiring unused or duplicate content.
- Lower storage and compute consumption through targeted archival and deletion.
- Improve governance confidence by providing evidence-backed recommendations for cleanup.
Who benefits
- BI Team and Tableau Platform Owners — streamline content and reduce support burden.
- Data Governance Committee — obtain evidence for archival and consolidation decisions.
- IT & Licensing teams — optimise licence distribution and capacity planning.
Step 1 — Data Collection
Pull historical event logs and metadata for workbooks, views, projects, and users to build a complete interaction dataset.
Step 2 — Activity Measurement (Last 90 Days)
Calculate total views and unique users per workbook over the rolling 90-day window to surface recent engagement trends.
Step 3 — Recency and Update Tracking
Identify each workbook's last viewed and last updated timestamps to detect stale or abandoned content.
Step 4 — Engagement Classification & Output
Categorise every workbook into Active, Low Engagement, Limited Reach, or Unused, and flag Low / Limited / Unused items for rationalization actions.
| Insight Category | What the recipe discovered | Business Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Zero / Low Views (90 days) | Workbooks with none or less than 10 unique views in the past 90 days were identified and grouped. | Candidates for archival or deletion to reduce storage and maintenance cost. |
| Limited Reach | Workbooks accessed by fewer than three unique users during the measurement | Opportunity to consolidate or notify owners before retirement to avoid breaking dependencies. |
| Stale Content (1+ year) | Workbooks that are likely obsolete and consuming unnecessary resources. | Enables governance teams to prioritize redesign, archive, or deletion decisions with minimal risk. |
Make sure the following ingredients are available in your workspace:
- Connected datasets are crawled and profiled